TV On Monday, Adam Curtis’s new documentary series, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace begins and in the past few weeks he’s written several column and given a few interviews previewing his new thesis which is that rather us controlling machines, machines control us. Or as Grace Dent so expertly describes today in her review of the first episode, when we sit at a computer, because of the several dozen applications which are open and which we’ve signed up to, we’re no longer in charge of our own destiny, we’re simply becoming components in a system and we’re all employed voluntary or otherwise to keep that system stable.

Anyone who’s worked in a call centre or indeed anything with some form of customer service element can relate and it’s a grim berth. In a sense, by creating social media accounts, be they of the updating or blogging variety or something graphical in Second Life, creating an actual avatar, what we’re doing is making the job of auditing just that bit easier (Google, after all, works by tracking the popularity of a website through the number of links we've made). But more than that, some of us, especially those of us who’ve been blogging for nearly ten years and effectively bringing some kind of order to both the web and the real world in linear reverse dated fashion, might wonder about the extent to which we’re no longer ourselves and have simply become a reflection of the machine.

As the brilliant 90s Guardian book alt.culture, pointed out, its subject, Generation X was demographically unique because advertisers couldn’t sell them products, the media-savvy part of their brain cynically broke through the message so that people only bought that which they really needed not what the advertiser tried in vain to convince them that they needed. I wore a polyester blue jacket, over tie-dyed shirt, odd socks and turned up jeans. I ate chicken in breadcrumbs with instant noodles. I didn’t drink. "I was an individual!" I laughed smugly, as I visited Morrisons every week and bought one of their fresh pizzas because they looked good in the advert.

Fifteen years later, I picked up a copy of Stuff White People Like and discovered that in fact, such barriers had been broken down and all of the things I thought made me an individual, like enjoying Wes Anderson films, acoustic covers, drinking bottles of water and threatening to move to Canada (or France in my case) were also enjoyed by a great many people. The obvious extension of that paranoia is that the reason I like hating corporations, self-deprecating humour, platonic friendships and public transportation that is not a bus is because the internet told me to, oh so subtly, through the articles read, the people friended, word of mouth.

The obvious extension of that then is that we’ve all essentially become gangers. Not specifically, we all still have something related to our own personalities and our own memories of having to wait for the damned bus only for it to packed in the morning and not being able to get a seat, but like the gangers we’ve become an extension of the machine which controls us and when we go off-line, a never occasion for those of us employing mobile technology but nevertheless, we’re carrying all of the elements of the subject that we’ve copied around with us, potentially unaware of what’s happened to us until it’s been pointed out to us, either by a Time Lord or reading books like Stuff White People Like.

What I’ve had to deal with having made this realisation is whether it matters, whether like the Joe Pantoliano nasty in The Matrix, we should really care that the steak that we’re chewing is synthetic or as in that case doesn’t exist as a physical object if it tastes so good. If I enjoy Wes Anderson films, yes, even The Darjeeling Company, should it matter that even if despite being an artist he’s still working for a coportationcreating the kinds of films that people like me like so that people like me will pay money to see them even if we wouldn’t seen dead at Vampires Suck which was also produced by a different part of the same studio for a different audience.

Ultimately, like the gangers once they’ve gotten over the shock of realising that they aren’t the person who remembers that morning’s breakfast but something else, probably not, because you ultimately have two choices. Embrace your pseudo-individuality but fight with every bone in your body or braincells in your head to retain something for yourself hoping against hope that the something you’re retaining for yourself isn’t also a reflection of the machine. Or go insane. I’ve chosen the former (not that these seven paragraphs are admittedly much proof) and wonder how many other people spent the morning reading the introduction to the Arden Shakespeare’s third series edition of Troilus and Cressida. For fun.

But what those seven paragraphs also demonstrate is that despite Moffat consciously coming up with the idea of ripping off Avatar, as explained in this interview, writer Matthew Graham’s approach to not going away and doing that is working at a higher thematic level than his previous disaster Fear Her. There were no “Not you too, Bob” moments here in what was a gripping forty-five minutes of drama, which, despite having a whiff of last year’s stodgy Silurian two-parter in terms of the human approach to trying to deal with something you don’t understand leading to war (electrocute it) , had enough dark corners and questions about the human psyche to keep us glued.

Perhapssurprisingly of all, it’s also to the most “traditional” bit of Who since the show came back. We say this quite often, but consider how the episode begins with a lengthy prologue scene without the TARDIS crew leading to a console room scene featuring some unrelated games, the ship bouncing into the adventure via some special cataclysm, only for the crew to effectively be captured by some relatively two dimensional human contractors and heralded towards the moral dilemma at the heart of the story. Look also at how once Auton, once copied himself Rory disobeys the Doctor and the human leader is revealed to be a ganger at about twenty-two and half minutes into the episode. Scream...

Remove the physical contact and you have a story from the Davison era with better lighting. You could also argue, given how Smith seems to be at his most Troughton here, that it’s one of those Davison era stories which consciously apes Season Five, Warriors of the Deep and Frontios and its ilk though directed by someone whose previous experience is Spooks rather than Juliet Bravo. You could further add that some elements of the Doctor’s behaviour especially the veiled references to having seen the ganger technology or even having been to this island before, and not telling Amy everything have about them the sinister mystery of McCoy.

You would not have seen anything like this in the Russell T Davies era. The Impossible Planet comes close, but that stopped off for chats about the Doctor and Rose being stuck there and trying to make a life together. Even with the TARDIS steeped in acid, there’s no question of that. The Doctor is just trying to fix the problem at hand, Rory’s gladding about after some local skirt and Amy’s generally left to ask for some exposition, screech, and also look good in a skirt and glad about too after her husband. Like I said, without the physical contact, in the classic scenario she’s basically Tegan or Polly, he’s Turlough or Ben. Or whoever.

It’s the kind of story which picks one thought, one idea and goes with that. Unlike the existential crises of clone Martha in The Poison Sky or the human Doctor in Journey’s End or the enslavement of the Ood which were just one element of a story with multiple strands, this so far, give or take Rory’s wandering eye, has decided to keep to that single notion, albeit with the requisite reminders of the ongoing storylines. Graham’s script also needs us to believe in this pseudo-science; the cloning tank in The Sontaran Stratagem was just a thing required to do another thing so that another thing would happen. The Rebel Flesh is also about the thing and what the thing does.

And it just works. That lighting does help, taking full advantage of the stonework in the atmospheric locations to create shadows for both sides to hide from us and each other, eavesdropping when necessary. These multiple tourist attractions were perfectly chosen right down to the fitted bathroom and provided an incongruous place to have an acid works (cf, Euro Sea Gas in Fury of from the Deep for comparison) and some relatively advanced cloning technology. The make-up for the gangers too is beautifully realised, recalling the Gelfling puppets in The Dark Crystal, faces that aren’t quite human yet somehow sympathetic, quite rightly given the title of the next episode, “The Almost People”.

Superb performance too. It’s difficult to single anyone out at this early stage with just two episodes, sorry one episode, gone, but Mark Bonnar’s reaction to himself (or his character) dealing with the same emotional connection to his son and indeed the emoting of the emotional connection to his son was especially poignant and along with the inevitable Rachel in Blade Runner style photograph scene for Sarah Smart chemically explained to us what was at stake for the gangers just as it did for the speck of humanity on this rock. Raquel Cassidy was well Raquel Cassidy, and great to finally have some kind of Party Animals reunion.

There were many great moments, not least the shoes, which is one of the funniest single shot gags since Eccleston's reaction to hearing Margaret Blain taking the window route in Boomtown. Yes it is. I also adored those opening console room scenes, which like a K9 chess games or Romana costume change offer a glimpse into what it’s like to exist on the TARDIS between adventures, that travellers in the forth dimension need to take a break sometimes. These television spaces can never be the same as the ones in the Eighth Doctor novels, big enough to store a mini or house a butterfly collection, but they underscore that this isn’t just an intergalactic taxi but also a home.

Yet having written all of this, I can’t help the nagging suspicion that with all it's trad era trappings, that like The Darjeeling Company, The Rebel Flesh has been deliberately created to confirm to us old school fans that it is the same old show just in case the opening two parter suggests something else. The fans who remember the unusual face like Cactus Tom in Meglos, might have read Nick Wallace’s leighth-era novel Fear Itself which also dealt with the concept of avatars and that all I’ve done in writing this review and mentioning those things is fallen into the trap Curtis warns us about codifying everything and creating order. But somehow, I don’t care.

"And am I really the only person to have seen through the hype surrounding Pirates of the Caribbean, an ill- disciplined, laugh-free debauch (based on a fairground ride, no less) from Gore Verbinski, a talentless hack whose previous crimes against cinema include desecrating the sublime Japanese shocker Ringu with a brainless US remake?"

Unless you know better. And now to YouTube as we listen to a man become increasingly bitter over time:

Lazing on the banks of the Avon a couple of years ago, the shadow of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre protecting my lily white skin from the early evening sun, I had two books for company: Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age and Penguin’s The Shakespeare Miscellany. Both had been invaluable as I travelled about the various historic buildings-cum-tourist attractions, but both were also bewilderingly complex, the Bate because of its sheer level of academic detail, the Penguin because its couple of hundred pages, modelled on the similar volumes from Ben Schott, pack its information in a seemingly random order. Fine for dipping into but its staccato style obscuring its treasures.

The Arden Shakespeare Miscellany sandwiches itself neatly in-between, bringing the academic authority of a series which isn’t afraid to describe itself as “the critical edition of Shakespeare” to a kind of deconstructed biography of the bard that manages to contain the Penguin’s wit and knowledge whilst simultaneously placing it within a readable structure. There are seven sections: his life, Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, authorship, style, facts and figures, use of language and afterlife, with short single paged synopses of all the plays in the canon (which in keeping with Arden’s general mood include Sir Thomas More, Double Falsehood and Edward III) and box-outs on related elements like “rhetoric” or “stage directions”.

At first glance, there’s not much material in Jane Armstrong’s volume that can’t be found in other similar guides. But the devil (as he surprisingly didn’t say first) is in the detail, because each section digs deeper than most. The passages on authorship manage to introduce then convincingly dismiss most of the potential theories within a few paragraphs. This is the first time I’ve seen the ways in which he employed language, “hendiadys” or “anaphora” explained lucidly enough for me to understand. I can now tell when Hamlet says “To Be Or Not To Be” if he’s doing so from a Quarto or Folio text. Most extraordinarily the sorry tale of Charles and Mary Lamb is explained, full of the kind of madness and murder that powers the plays they would successfully adapt.

There are few weaknesses. Dotting the synopses through the volume printed on grey-hewed pages tends to break up the flow of the text and because they’re in alphabetical order are rarely relevant to the accompanying section (Macbeth is a rare example). The considerations of adaptations and the afterlife of Shakespeare lack passion and is a subject better dealt with in the Penguin which offers a greater sense of the theatrical history of the plays, through anecdotes and quotes from participants. Some of the lists feel like filler; although there’s a useful box containing all the words Shakespeare originally did or didn’t coin (such a shame that "kickie-wickie" didn’t enter the vocabulary) the role call of “Eminent Shakespeareans” has little substance beyond names and dates and lists of roles (Helen Mirren played Diana, but where not told when or for whom).

Yet despite that, of all volumes I’ve seen so far, this is the one I’d recommend to students and as a gift because it isn’t embarrassed to become technical when its required, because it’s inquisitive and causes the reader to become inquisitive and a genuine sense of being spoken to as an equal, of wanting to lead us through someone else fascination with the subject (it includes a list of the plants which would be perfect if one wanted to set up a Shakespearean garden). When you’ve read as many books about Shakespeare as I’d obsessed through this year, it’s easy to become jaded after hearing the same anecdotes over and again. What the Arden Shakespeare Miscellany demonstrates is that it just depends who’s writing.

"Daniela Nardini heads a quintet of Scottish actors joining the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in an abridged performance of Shakespeare's irresistible comedy Much Ado About Nothing at Glasgow City Halls on Saturday 28 May. A story about unwilling lovers Benedick and Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most popular comic plays, and features incidental music written by one of Hollywood's most celebrated composers, Erich Korngold, performed by the BBC SSO.

"Daniela Nardini heads a quintet of Scottish actors joining the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in an abridged performance of Shakespeare's irresistible comedy Much Ado About Nothing at Glasgow City Halls on Saturday 28 May. A story about unwilling lovers Benedick and Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most popular comic plays, and features incidental music written by one of Hollywood's most celebrated composers, Erich Korngold, performed by the BBC SSO.

It's being recorded for broadcast later on BBC Radio 3. Hopefully, like the previous Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night's Dream experiment, it'll also appear on television.

"Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving."

It’s 1995, I’m in my first flush of college in Leeds and I’m standing in HMV considering a VHS boxset of this Richard Burton’s Hamlet just as I have on a few previous Saturdays. Once again I turn it over and look at the price, £19.99 and consider whether it is the worth my weekly food budget and once again I put it back with a sigh. Then it’s 1997 and I’ve been paid some wages and visit the HMV in Liverpool specially in order to buy it only to discover that it’s been deleted already and I’ve missed my chance. Now in 2011, I’ve bought a VHS copy on eBay for about a tenner and as with so many purchases from the website, an itch has been scratched.

In the meantime I found a copy of Argo’s audio release but knew, because of the number of texts that referred to it, that it was best seen first, rather than just heard especially after the rigmarole which led to the show being recorded. As Richard Burton (who married Liz Taylor during the Canadian tour of Hamlet) reveals in a trailer and the entertaining interview (see below) which act as an introduction to the performance, using a process called “electronovision” and cameras set up throughout the Lunt-Fontaine Theatre on Broadway, a thousand prints were struck so that over four simultaneous performances audiences across the US could enjoy the production.

Anyone attending the NT Live events will agree with Burton (or his script writer), that those witnessing the experiment would see “the theatre of the future taking shape before [their] eyes.” Like the NT Live events, these were supposed to be limited showings; Sheriden Morley reveals in the booklet accompanying the audio cassettes, prints were contractually ordered to be destroyed and that it’s only thanks to Burton keeping a copy for himself and submitted one to the BFI that this was able to resurrected for the home market in 1995. Hopefully, with a safe enough gap, the NT will also allow their recordings to go to shiny disc. I missed Rory Kinnear.

John Gielgud’s production is at least famous enough to have gained a nickname, the “rehearsal room Hamlet” or some derivative thereof. Again in the booklet, Gielgud explains that by acting in rehearsal clothes with minimal props, he hoped that “the beauty of the language and imagery may shine through unencumbered by an elaborate reconstruction of any particular historical period” and to capture the magic of the final read-through when the play cracks on through without interruption from the director and before "the “final adjuncts” cramp the player’s imagination and detract from the poetic imagery” of the text.

It’s a laudable but paradoxical idea because even in attempting to find the moment “before costumes, scenery and lighting are added” such things have still been applied. These are not the clothes the actors turned up for work in – particularly noticeable in the case of Burton’s black habit – and this is still a set which has been designed to look like a rehearsal space, with a costume rack as the arras and large doors opening backwards into a void to accommodate the entre and exeunt of the actors. There are still many lighting effects denoting night and day and spookily blasting the crowned silhouette of the Ghost across the scenery, dwarfing the actors.

Nevertheless, Gielgud is correct when he suggests that Shakespeare’s words are powerful enough to stand alone especially when employed by the deep Welsh tones of Richard Burton, whose magnetic stage presence is so strong it could almost be the reason why the signal the VHS tape its housed on is clearly degrading, the tracking all over the place. He’s applauded by the theatre audience even before he’s spoken, and that applause continues throughout the show, after every soliloquy, after every emotional plea. But they’re not simply being polite; he is extraordinary, absolutely justifying the praise in the reviews at the back of the booklet.

Howard Taubman of The New York Times says that Burton “dominates the drama” and actually if I have a criticism, it’s that he burns so bright the rest of the cast lose visibility, the energy dimming considerably whenever he’s not on stage. Hume Cronyn as Polonius is able to match him and their scenes in which the son of the late king takes full advantage of the Lord Chamberlain’s misguided attempts at diagnosis are amongst the strongest interpretations I’ve seen, their comic time perfect. But elsewhere, the play does suffer. But by contrast, the relationship with Horatio, often the beating heart at the centre of the play, is entirely empty.

Few actors are able to make an impression. Alfred Drake’s Claudius is an unusually sympathetic figure and both he and Gielgud take full advantage of the critical suggestion that the new king took power in order prevent Denmark from being re-taken too easily by Fortinbras due to having a monarch who's gone soft since originally annexing the land, Drake presenting a man who now finds himself repentant and fully aware that he’s going to hell. John Cullum nicely taps into how Laertes’s fate mirrors Hamlet by assuming many of Burton’s physical mannerisms (years later Cullum would spend five years on Northern Exposure as Holling, owner of the local bar).

Despite my reservations, Gielgud’s production fully deserves its reputation, even if on other nights, not everything went completely to plan. Commenting in LIFE Magazine on a book that was later published about the rehearsal process, Burton recollects that he wasn’t always competent when it came to remembering lines. One evening he even began speaking “To Be Or Not To Be” in German, and although as he observes, there was little recognition from the audience beyond a slight murmur, all hell broke out at the back of the stage where Drake and Cronyn were hidden observing. Looks like I’ll be hunting down that book now too.

Radio Fans of radio history will love the opening moments of this welcome release of John Tydeman’s long deleted Hamlet, as an RP voice from a man you can tell just from the tone of his voice is wearing DG announces that what we're about to hear is “a new stereophonic production” and that “the play will be presented in two parts with an intermission after approximately an hour and forty-minutes”. The listener is sent right back to the cold Halloween night in 1971 when this first broadcast just before seven o’clock, perhaps tucked up in front of the gas fire, the single source of heat in the house, ears glued to the radiogram as the ghostly tragedy unfolded.

The highlight is quite rightly Ronald Pickup as the Dane. The BBC’s publicity of the time suggested he was that generation’s Hamlet (source), and although that’s perhaps overstating things (there were a lot of them about in the early seventies) gives us a prince that flip-flap-flops between controlled sanity in public and genuine madness – sparked by the news of his father’s death – in private. He’s as pleasant as Cary Grant in North By Northwest and it’s this geniality, inconsistent with his usual personality, which attracts the curiosity of the other palace inhabitants, Pickup able to communicate in audio the mask which never slips in public.

The rest of the cast is filled out with a range of experienced stage and radio actors. Martin Jarvis’s Horatio has an unusual independence, loyal to Hamlet but leading his own life. The most disconcerting performance is from Robert Lang, the timbre of whose voice sounds almost but not exactly like Jacobi. Angela Pleasance (Donald’s daughter best known at the time for playing Catherine Howard in The Six Wives of Henry VIII) is an initially extremely aristocratic Ophelia whose tip into psychosis is chilling, her voice skipping restlessly through the listener's ears, breaking through indiscriminate emotions by the second.

Spreading a full length production of the second quarto across three cds, the crisp sound quality, a brilliant contrast from the earlier cassette version released in 1998, highlights the experimental nature of this early stereo which attempts to mimic the experience of being in a theatre rather than the more intimate atmosphere of later radio production in which the actor’s voice is pressed close to the speaker. The music is provided by Malcolm Clarke of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, best known amongst some of us for his experimental scoring of Doctor Who episodes, and his electronic twang is well utilised to mimic the pipes of Fortinbras’s army.

Fans of radio history will love the opening moments of this welcome release of John Tydeman’s long deleted Hamlet, as an RP voice from a man you can tell just from the tone of his voice is wearing DG announces that what we're about to hear is “a new stereophonic production” and that “the play will be presented in two parts with an intermission after approximately an hour and forty-minutes”. The listener is sent right back to the cold Halloween night in 1971 when this first broadcast just before seven o’clock, perhaps tucked up in front of the gas fire, the single source of heat in the house, ears glued to the radiogram as the ghostly tragedy unfolded.

The highlight is quite rightly Ronald Pickup as the Dane. The BBC’s publicity of the time suggested he was that generation’s Hamlet (source), and although that’s perhaps overstating things (there were a lot of them about in the early seventies) gives us a prince that flip-flap-flops between controlled sanity in public and genuine madness – sparked by the news of his father’s death – in private. He’s as pleasant as Cary Grant in North By Northwest and it’s this geniality, inconsistent with his usual personality, which attracts the curiosity of the other palace inhabitants, Pickup able to communicate in audio the mask which never slips in public.

The rest of the cast is filled out with a range of experienced stage and radio actors. Martin Jarvis’s Horatio has an unusual independence, loyal to Hamlet but leading his own life. The most disconcerting performance is from Robert Lang, the timbre of whose voice sounds almost but not exactly like Jacobi. Angela Pleasance (Donald’s daughter best known at the time for playing Catherine Howard in The Six Wives of Henry VIII) is an initially extremely aristocratic Ophelia whose tip into psychosis is chilling, her voice skipping restlessly through the listener's ears, breaking through indiscriminate emotions by the second.

Spreading a full length production of the second quarto across three cds, the crisp sound quality, a brilliant contrast from the earlier cassette version released in 1998, highlights the experimental nature of this early stereo which attempts to mimic the experience of being in a theatre rather than the more intimate atmosphere of later radio production in which the actor’s voice is pressed close to the speaker. The music is provided by Malcolm Clarke of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, best known amongst some of us for his experimental scoring of Doctor Who episodes, and his electronic twang is well utilised to mimic the pipes of Fortinbras’s army.

Books As we’ve seen on numerous occasions in recent years, during his travels the Doctor has left documentary evidence of one form or another, be it an Egyptian hieroglyph, a cameo in a Laurel and Hardy film or artefacts in futuristic museums based on asteroids. He also has an affinity for the archaeologists who could potentially uncover these appearances, presumably because like him they’re interested in discovering history except of course the Doctor can be eyewitness to events that they can only make evidential assumptions about.

In The Hounds of Artemis, writer James Goss draws these two elements together as the grand daughter of an archaeologist uncovers the diary of one Amy Pond which describes an incident in which she and the Doctor gatecrashed an expedition in the late 1920s which is searching for the tomb of the titular goddess. The Time Lords knows that this Murder in Mesopotamia full of middle class ninnies are for the chop, but their fate is a total mystery and so he tags along sure that his presence is the reason that whatever befell these poor souls didn’t tip over into something much worse.

This is the franchise doing a full on impression of the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft paradigm, with tents in caverns, breakfast around campfires and torches illuminating wall carvings. Thanks to Professor Bernice Summerfield, we’ve enjoyed plenty of similar adventures set on alien planets, but these kinds of Terran investigations are relatively rare, presumably because the given writer has to justify why the Doctor doesn’t just simply go back in the TARDIS and find out for himself what the given artifact was for.

Like many of the best Doctor Who stories, a great deal of the synopsis is in the title, but with what is a relatively slight tale to explain what the hounds are would give away far too much (I’d argue that both the cover and the interview with Goss in this month’s DWM might even go too far!). Goss carefully paces his story by cross cutting between the first person of Amy’s diary and a more traditional third person, often giving two perspectives on the same scene. It’s perhaps slightly more idiosyncratic than in his award winning Tenth Doctor story, Dead Air, which kept to the Time Lord’s perspective but does allow him to ramp up the tension as the TARDIS team are put under threat.

The two threads are kept neatly separate by having two readers. Matt Smith has become an old hand with audiobooks already and he clearly enjoys himself as skips between the Doctor, Amy and the rest of the characters, Goss’s staccato prose (or should that be script) allowing for a few poetic moments in which his Doctor’s range shines through. At one point Amy describes how his “Young face suddenly became very old” and you can hear that incongruity in the actor’s voice as he skips between threatening the villain and promising to take his companion for a happy meal.

His real world companion, Clare Corbett, arguably has the harder job because she’s not Karen Gillan in a piece which may well have been written with the television companion in mind. But Corbett is a worthy replacement as she skips between the grand daughter and Amy herself, and if her accent isn’t a complete match, aided by Goss, she catches most of Karen’s mannerisms (including the Scottish stormer's slightly glib approach to proceedings) and you could well imagine that it’s Amy offering her best German accent or Doctor impression when necessary.

To say much more would spoiler your enjoyment of what is a very entertaining play. This is a full-blooded burst of action adventure mixed with an horrific dose of body horror that’s well worth uncovering, the two narrative threads keeping the momentum and mystery content up right through to the end, the performances of Smith and Corbett making this a worthwhile purchase (assuming you don't already have the vanilla release gifted to you by the The Guardian).

How do you create a sense of place in Shakespearean audio productions? A recent Radio 3 production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona became The Two Gentlemen of Valasna and was recorded on location in Maharashtra, with an all-Indian cast, the sounds of the landscape gifting much colonial atmosphere even if something of the story was lost in the abbreviated text. Studio bound, director Richard Eyre’s approach in this millennial recording of Macbeth (also available with the title actors on the cover) is to thread a sound of bitter wind across much of the duration and allow every breath of his actors to assault the microphones punctuating each line and clause, underscoring the emotional resonance of each comma or semi-colon.

His other trump card is to deliver the play in strong Edinburgh accents drawing the audience right back to the turn of the previous millennium and the bloody time of the original monarch, and though Shakespeare has blurred the history (historical Duncan was a much younger man and killed in battle against Macbeth’s forces rather than in his bed chamber), this production does much to underscore the plausibility of his alternative account. Eyre increases the brutality by emphasising the hard consonants in “murder” reversing the trend in some texts (notably the Arden Second Series) to soften the central sound to "murther".

In cutting the horrible deeds of the witches in act one, scene three and diving straight into their meeting with Macbeth, Eyre gives the impression that this will be a less supernatural reading. But the spot music is filled with deathly chords and when Ken Stott’s Macbeth returns to the terrible women who prophesise his doom, the soundtrack fractures and we absolutely understand the mental drift the new king undergoes. Dual casting also offers the possibility that the witches are inhabiting the action themselves, Phyllis Logan and Tracy Wiles playing Ladies Macbeth and Macduff respectively as well as gruffing up their voices to become these weird sisters.

Stott seems initially uncertain in the role, his breaths falling in the wrong places in the verse, apparently making a meal of the iambic pentameter. But beyond the bloody execution, counter to most interpretations, his Macbeth gains an initial startling sense of purpose, his uncertainty only properly returning beyond the death of his wife, his broken sense of the verse returns making his initial hesitancy a feature rather than a failure. Like Ophelia, Lady M is one of Shakespeare’s few roles that never quite works on audio; we need to see her hypnotic mental dance with her husband, the persuasive moment when she fixes him in the eye and all is lost. But Logan cheekily takes advantage of the character's most erotic moment when she calls upon the spirits to embolden her.

Graham Crowdon makes a brief but touching appearance as the Old Man, Rosse’s father though in truth few of the supporting cast really make much of a particular impression, but again that’s as a result of Eyre’s presumed requirement for crisp, clean, lucid diction and interpreting in audio one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies in which plot and structure overwhelm character beyond the title role. Nevertheless Tracy Wiles impresses as Lady Macduff, her guttural deathly screams upon the murder of her and her family piercing the ears and Tom Mannion’s Macduff’s reaction on hearing the news of same is one of the production’s highlights.

Radio How do you create a sense of place in Shakespearean audio productions? A recent Radio 3 production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona became The Two Gentlemen of Valasna and was recorded on location in Maharashtra, with an all-Indian cast, the sounds of the landscape gifting much colonial atmosphere even if something of the story was lost in the abbreviated text. Studio bound, director Richard Eyre’s approach in this millennial recording of Macbeth (also available with the title actors on the cover) is to thread a sound of bitter wind across much of the duration and allow every breath of his actors to assault the microphones punctuating each line and clause, underscoring the emotional resonance of each comma or semi-colon.

His other trump card is to deliver the play in strong Edinburgh accents drawing the audience right back to the turn of the previous millennium and the bloody time of the original monarch, and though Shakespeare has blurred the history (historical Duncan was a much younger man and killed in battle against Macbeth’s forces rather than in his bed chamber), this production does much to underscore the plausibility of his alternative account. Eyre increases the brutality by emphasising the hard consonants in “murder” reversing the trend in some texts (notably the Arden Second Series) to soften the central sound to "murther".

In cutting the horrible deeds of the witches in act one, scene three and diving straight into their meeting with Macbeth, Eyre gives the impression that this will be a less supernatural reading. But the spot music is filled with deathly chords and when Ken Stott’s Macbeth returns to the terrible women who prophesise his doom, the soundtrack fractures and we absolutely understand the mental drift the new king undergoes. Dual casting also offers the possibility that the witches are inhabiting the action themselves, Phyllis Logan and Tracy Wiles playing Ladies Macbeth and Macduff respectively as well as gruffing up their voices to become these weird sisters.

Stott seems initially uncertain in the role, his breaths falling in the wrong places in the verse, apparently making a meal of the iambic pentameter. But beyond the bloody execution, counter to most interpretations, his Macbeth gains an initial startling sense of purpose, his uncertainty only properly returning beyond the death of his wife, his broken sense of the verse returns making his initial hesitancy a feature rather than a failure. Like Ophelia, Lady M is one of Shakespeare’s few roles that never quite works on audio; we need to see her hypnotic mental dance with her husband, the persuasive moment when she fixes him in the eye and all is lost. But Logan cheekily takes advantage of the character's most erotic moment when she calls upon the spirits to embolden her.

Graham Crowdon makes a brief but touching appearance as the Old Man, Rosse’s father though in truth few of the supporting cast really make much of a particular impression, but again that’s as a result of Eyre’s presumed requirement for crisp, clean, lucid diction and interpreting in audio one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies in which plot and structure overwhelm character beyond the title role. Nevertheless Tracy Wiles impresses as Lady Macduff, her guttural deathly screams upon the murder of her and her family piercing the ears and Tom Mannion’s Macduff’s reaction on hearing the news of same is one of the production’s highlights.

Books Having built an excellent reputation for producing authentic readings of the TARGET novelisations of classic Doctor Who, with The Stones of Blood, AudioGo have controversially dispensed with Terrance Dicks’s 1980 adaptation in favour of new work by the story’s original scriptwriter David Fisher. TARGET had always been in the business of asking the originator of each story if they’d be interested in adapting their work into prose, but according to the preview in Doctor Who Magazine, Fisher hadn’t been aware of a book coming out until it was published, his agent having not passed on the news. He’s no longer with that agent. But happily all of these years later, AudioGo have gifted him the opportunity to provide his take on the story.

From slap bang in the middle of the Key To Time season, The Stones of Blood sees the Doctor and Romana pitch up at the stone circle of Bodcombe Tor, where eccentric friends Professor Amelia Rumford and Vivian Fey intrigue them with their stories of the stone circle and they become messed up with a local druidic sect. As anyone who’s seen the television version will know, Fisher begins the story with what at first appears to be the kind of Hammersque tale beloved of producer Philip Hinchliffe all blood sacrifices and sibling tragedy, but soon drifts back into the typical whimsy of newer producer Graham Williams until by the end, Baker is trying to outwit a machine-based legal system represented by a couple of obstinate balls of light.

Fisher’s fascination with stone circles began with a filming trip to the Western Isles and extending his story to novel length allows him to demonstrate his grasp of their history, especially in a Radio 4 Book of the Week style introduction which is thick with the lore of Bodcombe Tor and although arguably some of his observations render later exposition obsolete, it’s still fascinating to hear about the many local inhabitants who fell victim to the Ogri across the years and the development de Vries’s rituals. The scratch of land in the tv episode becomes a fully realised patch of countryside, the kind of isolated drop of remote Englishness that would later reoccur in K9 and Company and be parodied to good effect in Hot Fuzz.

Having not read the Dicks adaptation, I can’t contrast the two approaches but Fisher’s feels substantially longer than those old TARGET stories which kept to a fairly limited pagination this spreads a hundred minutes of screen time over a leisurely four hours but its worth it for the level of detail Fisher brings to his characters. The two ill-fated campers gain thorough back stories and Romana’s aristocratic energy is contracted beautifully with Rumford’s harebrained academia. Both have to navigate what for them are entirely alien concepts; sausages sandwiches and bicycles for the former and in the case of the latter the futuristic world the Doctor has brought to the door of her cottage.

There’s a tendency in some of these readings for the actor to attempt impersonations of the original cast but Susan Engel (who portrayed Vivien in the original television version) largely reads much of this in her own voice, apart from moments when its electronically treated, which gives it the feeling of a sinister bedtime story. But it’s impossible for the mannerisms of the actors not to break through such as the grin which always breaks across Baker’s voice during sarcasm and she clearly has great memories of working with Beatrix Lehmann who is also lovingly resurrected. Once again, John Leeson is called on to recreate the voice of K9 and once again his is a proper performance, absolutely heartbreaking in the moment when his power drains away lest he become too invincible.

All in all this is a thoroughly entertaining listen that absolutely repays the decision to hand Fisher back command of his work.

"You didn't always take me where I wanted to go."
"But I always took you where you needed to go"

TV We’ve always suspected it and now Neil Gaiman has provided a confirmation. Over the years, over its forty-seven years, Doctor Who has invented itself and reinvented itself, its premise, bolting on new mythology, discarded other pieces that have stopped working, just like the characters of Auntie and Uncle in The Doctor’s Wife in fact, and more often than not it’s changed our perception of the stories which have gone before. It’s impossible to watch the sixties episode now without thinking of the Doctor as a Time Lord, the Meddling Monk too, even though the word wasn’t even uttered for six years. Similarly ever since the TV movie we’ve all had that nagging doubt about his parentage.

It’s not often that a single line of dialogue has the capacity to somewhat reconfigure the premise of the series, perhaps even change the narrative of all its stories across all media. Yet there it is and in one of the best episodes of the modern era, thank goodness. No longer do we need to worry about exactly why the Doctor and his entourage always seem to pitch up at the just the right moment in a planet’s history, from Cardiff in 1869 to Cwmtaff in 2020 or wherever the Ainley Master happens to be during JNT era. But unlike Dr. Sam Beckett, this Time Lord Doctor is driven by a known force to change history for the better, Sexy existing across all of time and space and plonking him down were she thinks he’s most “needed”.

This wasn’t the only nugget in what was a love letter to the franchise, the perfect golden anniversary episode a couple of years too early celebrating the semantics of the franchise just as it reinvented some of the syntactics. I’ll leave it to someone who’s better versed in the worlds of Neil Gaiman to analyse how it fits into the rest of his work (other than he seems like using architectural features as character names). Yet the man is clearly a "we". In his stage directions he described House as a Totters Lane at the end of the universe for goodness sake, and only a fan would be impish enough to create a corridor of doom and lead the production team to spend the entire OB working in a quarry.

As you might expect, the compilers of the continuity section of the TARDIS Index File entry for the episode are very excited. As it notes, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a TARDIS in humanoid form, there was Marie in Alien Bodies and Compassion. This TARDIS has even had limbs before, in the last huge anniversary story Zagreus, taking the image of the Brigadier though it fails to mention that in that story, the relationship with the Doctor can best be described as fractious and jealous. What it also doesn’t notice is that this isn’t the first time we’ve heard from a sentient House (cf, The Chimes at Midnight). It’s like a synopsis of the McGann era.

All of which means that the episode is kryptonite for reviewers seeking an original thought. I’ve not read many yet, but chances most of the eight to ten paragraph long opinion pieces you’ll read elsewhere will probably open in much the same way as this thing, give or take the references (has this sorted out Bad Wolf too?). They might pinion themselves on the other confirmation that Time Lords can change gender (the fight for Exile's canonicity starts here) or the way the publicity teased (quite successfully if my writing has been anything to go by) that Idris was herself some old Time Lord friend of the Doctor’s in much the same way as House teased the Doctor about the potential for surviving Time Lords.

There was no more apt an episode to broadcast in the week when, to put it lightly, Moffat went off on one about spoilers. I will admit that initially I was disappointed that the “old friend, new face” wasn’t one of the potential Time Lords, that the thing we’ve not seen since The War Games was a hypercube not the War Lord as may have been hinted. Then I realised that actually the whole point of drama is to surprise and that in their own way correct predictions are just as insidious as spoilers because the emotional core of what you’re witnessing becomes swept up in your personal elation at being correct. Being wrong, as I was here, made the sounds emanating from Suranne’s mouth just right.

We might try to seek some controversy elsewhere in a futile attempt to prove that episode wasn’t perfect. We might note the misunderstanding in relation to the meaning of “pull to open” which probably refers to the door on telephone box within the telephone box rather than the door to the telephone box itself which despite the handles have only ever really opened inwards apart from in The Eleventh Hour and the Cushing films where they opened outwards but the films are wrong and strange whereas this piece of dialogue was just strangely wrong. We might also consider that if that’s all we have to worry about, when in the preceding episode a whole character disappeared from the story without anyone in the story noticing, we need to take a good long hard look at our priorities.

Instead we should all just sit back and marvel. Marvel at Suranne Jones’s performance in which she was able to communicate the non-linearity of the TARDIS’s Ophelia-like premonitory pronouncements and make sense of a seven hundred year old organism which finally has the power of speech (Zagreus accepted). Their relationship wasn’t unlike that between the Doctor and River, the equal measures of attraction and exasperation but running much deeper and intensified due to the limited possible exposure. After her exaggerated turn as the Mona Lisa, it would be easy to dismiss Jones as someone who can’t really do Who, but by half-way though, I was ready to through Amy and Rory to the sidewalk.

Which is unfair of course, since Gaiman’s structure gave them both moments to shine, Rory in finding a logical reason for keeping House at bay, Amy in becoming wrapped up in another psychological horror. In the writer’s original version, these sections would have seen Amy going solo, and though you might argue that the many deaths of Rory have reached the point of self-parody, Karen has still somehow managed to make each seem very real which it still should be. Amy won’t ever become blasé about this because there’s always the possibility that at some point it might be true and this had an even greater ring of truth to it because of the faux-Rory’s tip into madness, his love for her apparently turning to hate.

I cheered twice during the episode. Once during the dialogue at the top of the review and secondarily when these two strode onto what’s now the old TARDIS set, explaining why it was hanging around Cardiff for so long, cameoing in a dozen post-RTD Confidentials. To see the two of them, and Matt, walking around that set was indeed incongruous, as incongruous as Peter Davison in Time Crash or Sylv in the TV movie’s cathedral. As Gaiman prosaically identifies in Confidential, clothes might maketh the man, but console rooms do too. That all of these auxiliary rooms have been archived gladdens will gladden the heart of any librarian who understands the magnitude of what’s lost when you destroy part of your history though its ambiguous as to whether it’s still there now, of course, thanks to House.

He might not have his face on the title sequences, but one of Wales’s most famous sons finally makes an appearance albeit in voice form. Giving it some of the Richard Burtons or Gabriel Wolfs, his rich baritone communicates threat even more than a thousand Daleks simply because we don’t know what he’s capable of. Gaiman uses him to contrast the warmth of the real TARDIS, protecting the passengers within its innards when it has the power to crush them. In Star Trek’s When Silence Has Lease, a similar entity tests the crew by cutting off their air; then it was at least in the search for scientific knowledge. House is just sadistic, making him one of the few sentient entities the Doctor has no quarms about evacuating.

As is ever the case with nu-Who the climax was a blub fest, and not just in the household of the Blue Peter winner who was able to see their work up on screen (and in a slightly less obnoxious way than in Love and Monsters). As one wag on twitter has said (its doing the rounds I don't know the original source), the Doctor burned up a sun to say goodbye, the TARDIS burned up a body to say hello. Rory makes a good point, as a nurse he should have been able to go some way to saving her and he might also have noted that what we're watching is the face of the person who died to give Sexy a sexy mouthpiece. Though I suppose like Margaret Slitheen you can only really relate to whatever's been put in front of you and go with that.

Richard Clark’s direction might initially have seemed a bit bland, but arguably in understanding that this was an episode in which every word counted he kept away from portraying the junkyard too frenetically with handheld cameras kept to a minimum, especially noticeable around “Idris” who’s mental state another director might have chosen to heighten with weird camera angles and wide-angle lenses. Murray Gold’s choice of music was equally unshowy mainly relying on the core themes, again perhaps so as not to pull the viewer out of the moment. A special word though for the costume designers tapped perfectly into the element of make do and mend, of found clothing (not unlike the tv adaptation of Gaiman’s Neverwhere).

After last week’s disappointment, this was a winning return to form, a stand alone episode which still had the capacity to add substantially to the unfolding text. In terms of the ongoing story, we were reminded once again that this is “a younger version” of the Doctor we’re watching, his future uncertain and there was still room for a nugget to ruminate on. I’ve suggested before that Silence in the Library can’t be a coincidental episode title and the TARDIS’s enegmatic "The only water in the forest is the River..." suggests that Forest of the Dead isn’t either. Who wants to bet that by the end of this series we’ll be travelling back to that library and rescuing the older River from the databank, a certain space suit her new means of travel?